Why won’t we embrace the Treaty?
Monuments are physical markers for the ideas and heritage that matter most to a community. Their symbolic power is well understood and for this very reason we are seeing communities around the world target statues that represent racism and injustice.
Likewise, the symbolism of pulling these statues down broadcasts the will of the people to dismantle systems of oppression and reject the sanitised narratives that isolate and privilege the views of one group over another.
Many of the plaques accompanying these statues actively suppress stories of ethnic cleansing, murder, land theft and slavery. This carries over to how the community discusses the events, often erasing or euphemising brutal truths.
The resulting burden on communities of colour is ongoing, and that is also true of the consequences of these painful histories. The systematic destruction of communities of colour is ongoing. Antiblackness is ongoing. Colonialism is ongoing. If we are genuine in our desire to confront and address this ongoing injustice, then we must seek to understand the enduring experience of those most impacted, and that necessitates centring (not censoring) voices of colour.
Ethical remembering calls on us to operate from the assumption that genocide, murder, and slavery are crimes that cannot be rationalised from any valid perspective. For this reason you’ll not find statues of Hitler in Germany, nor is the Holocaust discussed as the ‘‘Jewish perspective’’. It is taught from the moral standpoint that what happened was a crime against humanity and inexcusable. Ethical remembering therefore does not erase history, but contextualises it within amoral perspective.
What is less often discussed in this debate, however, are the political stakes held within righteous colonial narratives. The desperation to sanitise history, memorialise white heroes, and erase nonwhite suffering is much more to do with the embedding of white righteousness than historical integrity. It is a hyperdefensiveness born of the need to centre oneself in the national narrative as a hero, and therefore become a necessary component of our society. To expose the sins of colonisers, warmongers and slave traders is to expose the foundational sin of European supremacist power structures. To pull them down tugs the thread on a sweater that extends to power, economy and national identity.
This is profoundly unsettling to those who hold a deep underlying insecurity about their place here in Aotearoa. It feels as though their validity as New Zealanders is being questioned. If the statues are racist, the inference is that those who identify with, or feel represented by that history, are also racist – and this is taken as a personally offensive suggestion. The problem is that becausewe do not include race and privilege in the NZ curriculum, the majority of our nation is raised ignorant to its definition. Racism is not a character trait. Racism is merely actions, thoughts, or policies that uphold a system of racial inequity.
The good news is we can always take the anti-racist option to hear the concerns of those impacted, and respond to their call for healing action. The good news is also that Te Tiriti owaitangi secures the place of non-ma¯ori in this land.
This is not, however, merely a history or Treaty education issue. We spent tens of millions of dollars and an entire year in 2019 educating our nation on the impacts of Cook’s arrival. Resources and education programmes on the impacts of colonisation, and Te Tiriti owaitangi, are not in short supply. The deeper question is: what drives a systemic aversion to embracing Te Tiriti, and responding to our history?
This requires us to reach beyond reading lists and Tiriti workshops, to explore the issues of racism, power and privilege. It also calls on us to enact concrete antiracism policies and actions.
We must take up the challenge laid by the Black Lives Matter movement to proactively dismantle systems of oppression – not only in monuments, but in policy, thought, and action.
As a bicultural nation consisting of multicultural communities, addressing our deficit in understanding race and privilege is vital for a just future.
We have shown we are capable of so much, we are surely capable of meeting this challenge too.